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I’ve come full circle in Monster Hunter. At first it was so confusing it wasn’t fun. Then it was fun but I couldn’t find a weapon. Then I found a weapon, liked it, then hated it. I’m finally playing with a weapon I absolutely love, fighting bosses successfully without dying at all, and making some major progress in the game.

I’m using the Lance. It’s an awesome weapon because it provides me the perfect balance of defense and offense. No, it won’t come close to the damage of some weapons, but I can always stand on top of the monster and never have to retreat. Learning the monster’s moves, I can simply guard myself into invulnerability. Counter attacks and charging make for a fun meta. I also love mounting after a charge, and find it easier than any other form of mounting.

Most things are starting to make a lot of sense to me. I’ve figured out the weapon crafting. You basically want one of every element and status effect type, and you want to upgrade those as much as you can. Armor is there I’m still really, really confused. Do I bother spending my materials in low tier? Do they carry over to high tier? The gear really doesn’t offer much for me yet because I know that high tier (which I’m just about to be in low high tier) starts to give some serious skills and benefits.

I’m cultivating, trading, sending my palico army out to get stuff, and completing lots of hunts.

I’m easily putting in 2-3 hours a day into MHW. It’s addicting now. Very glad I stuck with it.

Netflix emailed me today to let me know my subscription price was going up. After being a little disgruntled, I realized the $14 price tag, despite being increased a couple dollars, is still a crazy good deal for how much I use that service.

Then I saw this today: Xbox Game Pass (which I wrote about early last year) now gets all first-party exclusive games added to the Xbox Game Pass subscription service on release date. For just one low price of $9.99 a month, you get access to over 100 games. With the promise if new games every month — including new titles like Sea of Thieves — and the first party titles going straight there, that’s a decent value.

Sea of Thieves is now in a closed beta state! I'm excited to be able to share my impressions of what we have in the closed beta, but will probably limit my thoughts to this since I am unsure right now if the Alpha content I played is still under NDA.

The game in this closed beta is a pared down "bespoke pirate experience" which is code for it being more of a demo without all of the features.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one of those games I saw back at an E3 or during some game conference and thought it looked decent, but then forgot about it completely.

They were kickstarted successfully back in 2014 for four times their ask, and were planning to deliver the game much sooner but saw some setbacks. Now the game is coming out February 13, 2018 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.